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Literary Excursions

On a trip to Tulum last Christmas, I think I managed the true Epicurean ideal of hedonism, sipping gently of the tropical sun, bodysurfing more than I read, reading more than I ate, and eating more than I worried. The entire endeavor was calibrated to maximize pleasure and minimize hardship, and so I learned nothing. I relaxed. I kept myself entertained. I visited the local Mayan ruins and paid more consideration to the vigilant application of sun goop than to the historical artifacts on display. I had joined the neocolonialist community that, through sky miles and vacation days, has effectively turned the developing world into a Sandals resort.

In other words, I was touring, to use Paul Bowles’s classic distinction, rather than traveling — seeking enjoyment rather than experience. I had failed to abide Camus’s dictum that the trip ought to be the highest form of asceticism. “There is no pleasure in traveling,” he wrote in his notebooks. “I look upon it more as an occasion for spiritual testing. If we understand by culture the exercise of our most intimate sense — that of eternity — then we travel for culture.” One imagines he is using the Bowlesian distinction here, meaning capital-T Traveling — to find communion with the universal and, ultimately, with the deepest, “most intimate sense” of oneself. Camus goes on to say: “Pleasure takes us away from ourselves in the same way as distraction, in Pascal’s use of the word, takes us away from God. Travel, which is like a greater and a graver science, brings us back to ourselves.”

Addicted, as we are, to comfort, utterly intolerant of boredom and feeling entitled to traipse about the globe, we have all but killed off the adventurer-memoirist. That species, at least in the Anglophone world, flourished with such organizations as the Royal Geographical Society and the scientific appetite for taxonomy in the late 19th century, reaching its apogee with the dissolute wanderings of the so-called leisure class. Rather than treat these creatures as relics, might we learn something from their methods, take a page out of their handbooks, adopt a little of that romantic Victorian approach in an effort to return to ourselves?

It was in this spirit that I returned to their books, ­gobbling up Henri de Monfreid’s memoirs from the ’30s, of running hash and guns off the coast of Somalia; Freya Stark’s chronicle of trekking to the ancient castle of the Assassins; Bowles’s travel essays in “Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue”; Richard Burton’s tales of exploring India, Africa and Arabia; Bruce ­Chatwin’s travelogues in Patagonia, Africa and Australia; and Ryszard Kapuscinski’s fearless accounts of war-torn states the world over. I read and reread these writers in eccentric loops, sometimes tossing them aside after a short while (Chatwin felt so familiar I couldn’t bear to reread much of his work), and in some cases going back in for the whole canon. Even if I didn’t need confirmation that Sir Richard Burton, in addition to being the standard-bearer for Victorian explorers, was a thrilling writer, it was fun to get it anyway.

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Illustration by André da Loba

In one lifetime, Burton translated the Kama Sutra and “The Arabian Nights,” traveled all of India, sneaked into Mecca in disguise, searched for the source of the Nile, traveled to Harar, and wrote several spectacular books. To witness his commitment and erudition is to see why. “So, after the first year,” he writes in “Falconry in the Valley of the Indus,” “when I had Persian at my fingers’ ends, sufficient Arabic to read, write and converse fluently, and a superficial knowledge of that dialect of Punjaubee which is spoken in the wilder parts of the province, I began my systematic study of the Scindian people, their manners and their tongue.” A great student of humanity, and a brilliant actor by necessity — he could remain incognito in hostile territory for months, when being found out would have meant his own death — Burton speaks to a belief that, in the trying on of many selves, he might find another, or at least more of himself.

In Stark, we get the straight Tao of traveling. “I had never thought of why I came,” she writes of ending up in Syria, alone, in 1927. “As to what I was going to do — I saw no cause to trouble about a thing so nebulous beforehand.” But by the end of her trip, when her local companions consider her a kind of pilgrim, she is driven with the doggedness of a Shackleton or a Hillary. “This is a great moment,” she writes, upon spotting the far-off castle she’d been hunting for months, “when you see, however distant, the goal of your wandering. The thing which has been living in your imagination suddenly becomes a part of the tangible world. It matters not how many ranges, rivers or parching dusty ways may be between you: it is yours now forever.”

All through India, China, Japan, Australia and the greater part of Africa, the Polish war correspondent Ryszard Kapuscinski carried a copy of Herodotus’ “Histories,” and after reading his thrilling body of work, it is illuminating to read the memoir in which he summarizes all of this trekking with his teacher in his pocket. In “Travels With Herodotus,” Kapuscinski rightly wonders why on earth his Greek hero spent a lifetime cataloging what was then the sum total of anthropological data on mankind. “Maybe he did everything on his own initiative, possessed by a passion for knowledge, driven by a restless and unfocused compulsion?” he reckons. “Perhaps he had a naturally inquiring mind, a mind that continuously generated a thousand questions giving him no peace, keeping him up nights?” Clearly Kapuscinski is afflicted with this “private mania” too, and it is difficult not to fall prey oneself.

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Some of the best writing done now is the great conflict reportage that could claim Kapuscinski’s work as distant ancestry — Denis Johnson’s “Seek” and Dexter Filkins’s “The Forever War” leap to mind — but these newer projects tend to be more political than personal. The searchers of the last century have been displaced by the gourmands of today, who write as often as not about the dumplings in Hong Kong or the truffles in Provence — by those who tour, not travel.

The tourist, Bowles wrote in “The Sheltering Sky,” “accepts his own civilization without question; not so the traveler, who compares it with the others, and rejects those elements he finds not to his liking.” Bowles, the perpetual expatriate, wrote movingly about the empathy required for this project. He took on his ventures as a search for alternate modes of living and being — not mere anthropological study, but more like continuing education in existential possibility. Deep in the Sahara, he distilled the sense of danger, of the risk versus reward in commitment to one’s travels, and the transcendence available therein — what he called the baptism of solitude: “You have the choice of fighting against it, and insisting on remaining the person you have always been, or letting it take its course. For no one who has stayed in the Sahara for a while is quite the same as when he came.”

Nor, indeed, is anyone who has stayed for a while in his books. The best travelogues are like little countries we can visit on the page, civilizations unto themselves, complete with elements we can borrow or bemoan. Even if we only laze on their lovely seasides.

Chris Wallace has written for The Paris Review Daily, TheAtlantic.com, the Los Angeles Review of Books and other publications.